The State of Black America: Progress, Pitfalls, and the Promise of the Republic

These thought-provoking if uneven essays published under the auspices of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education push back on the notion that the U.S. is “systemically racist.” Alleging that the “vision of black self-reliance” espoused by Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass was subsumed during the civil rights era by rhetoric depicting Black Americans “as a community defined by oppression and fundamentally at odds with America as a whole,” editor William B. Allen and contributor Mikael Rose Good argue that assimilation, rather than opposition, is the best path to ensuring that racial progress continues. For the most part, the book’s history lessons, including Robert D. Bland’s look at how Black politicians fought to keep Reconstruction alive in the late 19th century, are well grounded. Far less persuasive is Ian V. Rowe’s assertion that “a formerly enslaved people can now regularly produce some of the country’s most influential leaders in virtually every facet of American life,” which overlooks stark racial imbalances in Congress and corporate suites, and Star Parker and Robert Borens’s claim that a “dramatic deterioration of marriage and the traditional family” among Black Americans has more to do with racial inequality than racism. The result is a hit-or-miss collection whose political agenda undermines the force of its scholarship. (May)